Wikipedia May Soon Be Written By AI ... and No One Is Sure If It's A Good Idea

Five years ago Google launched an experimental project to have artificial intelligence write new articles for Wikipedia. As one reviewer noted, the results were "not even comparable" to those written by people. It was perhaps inevitable that this idea would come back around, and according to new reports, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales is now thinking about how AI could help the online encyclopedia to continue to grow and evolve.

If AI does help build humanity's knowledge base, we will have to find a way to solve the current "AI hallucination" problem where generative AI tools tend to just make up plausible sounding sources or fabricate "facts" that are completely wrong. Logically, it makes sense. If you ask a tool built for making up sentences on the spot to cite its sources, of course those sources would be made up as well.

I would, however, love to read the edit history of a debate between a grouchy self-important "Wikipedian" editor and an AI tool trying to get its page updates approved.